Ivy Leaguer Bounced, but H-1Bs Keep Jobs in Industry Layoff

One of the reasons our rulers are rarely worried about foreign worker programs is that such programs never adversely impact them, their relatives, or their college classmates.

If you are in Congress or one of the big foundations or universities, the likelihood is that no one you know personally ever lost a job to an under-paid foreign farm worker or had their wages reduced by a contractor's use of H-2B temporary workers. And if you can't identify with the victims, it is hard for you to see — as you should — that something is very wrong.

An exception to that rule emerged from an email I received the other day — an Ivy League graduate, a well-paid and long-time employee of the company in question, lost his or her job in a layoff while H-1B workers in the unit concerned kept their jobs.

Our informant would lose a valuable severance package were the specifics to surface. So instead of having an open discussion of the company's practices, as we have, for instance, in the Verizon strike, a fog of silence covers the matter.

So the name of the employer and the industry, and the name, gender, age, college, and specific skill of the worker in this case will remain under shrouds. The person involved is a U.S. citizen by birth.

I suspect, given the size of the H-1B program, that the CIS informant is not the only Ivy Leaguer who has been treated in this manner, though I have not heard of it happening to any of my own Princeton colleagues.

If the reader knows of other Ivy Leaguers who have suffered this fate, please email us, with "attention David North" in the subject line.

The H-1B program is something that needs substantial shrinking, if not a complete abolition; this is the case not because it harms the occasional Ivy Leaguer, but because it floods our labor markets and allows big corporations to hire nearly indentured, cheap foreign workers rather than American ones.

There are close to a million H-1B workers in the country at any one time; the government has been careful not to let us know exactly how many there are, or how adversely they effect the American labor market.